Since Forbes hired me in 1995 to write a legal column, I’ve taken advantage of the great freedom the magazine grants its staff, to pursue stories about everything from books to billionaires. I’ve chased South Africa’s first black billionaire through a Cape Town shopping mall while admirers flocked around him, climbed inside the hidden chamber in the home of an antiquarian arms and armor dealer atop San Francisco’s Telegraph Hill, and sipped Chateau Latour with one of Picasso’s grandsons in the Venice art museum of French tycoon François Pinault. I’ve edited the magazine’s Lifestyle section and opinion pieces by the likes of John Bogle and Gordon Bethune. As deputy leadership editor, these days I mostly write about careers and corporate social responsibility. I got my job at Forbes through a brilliant libertarian economist, Susan Lee, whom I used to put on television at MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour. Before that I covered law and lawyers for journalistic stickler, harsh taskmaster and the best teacher a young reporter could have had, Steven Brill.

The Innovation That Could Make Most Job Interviews Obsolete

Today I met with three representatives from a seven-year-old company called HireVue that is changing the way a lot of people get hired. Founded by a guy named Mark Newman when he was just 20 years old and fresh out of Westminster college in Salt Lake City, HireVue provides one-way video interviews where candidates respond to pre-set questions without a live person on the other side. Job seekers record the interviews at a time of their choosing and hiring managers watch the interviews when they are ready. In other words, instead of showing up someplace for a job interview, you create the interview yourself on video and send it in.

According to HireVue CEO David Bradford, the process saves companies a huge amount of time and money, especially if they are considering candidates from far away. Instead of paying for applicants to fly in, and then interviewing, at most, two people in an hour, a hiring manager can screen up to a dozen candidates in that amount of time. They can also sift through the video interviews at their leisure, and focus on what Bradford calls the “deal breaker” question in any one session.

As an example, Bradford describes how he hired his own office manager, Sharline Andersen, eight months ago. He had run an ad for the job and gotten 30 responses. Of those, he sent out 15 requests for video interviews. The candidates got back to him within three days, and Bradford screened their responses in just 45 minutes. Of the 15 videos, he picked two that he thought were most promising and asked those candidates to come for in-person interviews. If he hadn’t had the videos, he says he would have tossed Andersen’s resume, because she didn’t have as much experience as some of the other candidates. But based on what he saw, he included her and discovered she had the right combination of energy, enthusiasm and experience with social media, one of his chief needs.

Another advantage of HireVue: The hiring manager can share the videos with as many people as he likes, and the technology allows viewers to rate the candidates’ responses to each question, and share feedback with one another.

As an additional example, Bradford describes a hiring experience he went through at Fusion-io, the data center flash memory producer where he used to be CEO. He spent six months there searching for a chief financial officer, and did more than 40 in-person interviews. “It was the most critical hire we were going to make in that company,” he recalls. If he had been using HireVue, he says, he would have cut down the hiring time by at least five months and only met in person with five of those 40 candidates.

The typical HireVue interview lasts 12 minutes and has just four questions, with about three minutes to answer each question. Interviewees get 30 seconds to see each question before they respond. Before the interview starts, there is a practice question, and the video also instructs the applicant with some tips, like doing the interview in a quiet place with good lighting, and keeping your upper body in the field of view.

Clients can compose their own questions, or HireVue provides a library of possible queries. For an executive position that might include “Describe one of your greatest professional achievements,” or “Tell us about a time you had to cope with a high-pressure or stressful work situation.” For a sales job, a question might be, “Describe a time when you negotiated a sale despite initial resistance.”

Bradford says HireVue has 200 clients, including Nike, Starbucks, Walmart, Geico, Hasbro, Rio Tinto, Aetna and ConocoPhillips. The company charges between $5,000 and $1 million, depending on the volume of the client’s project. Bradford says fewer than 10% of hiring relies on one-way video interviewing at this point, but HireVue has seen its revenues leap by 500% this year, and is getting set to announce a Series C round of funding shortly. HireVue has competitors, but it’s a pioneer in the field.

For companies, it offers an efficient way to pre-interview candidates and cuts down on time-consuming in-person meetings and inefficient phone screenings. Interviews can be stored in a library and tapped for future hires. The sharing function and the ability to focus on the most important questions also seem appealing for interviewers. When Bradford demonstrated HireVue for me on his iPhone, it seemed so simple and fluid, I had a strong sense that this would catch on, especially at big companies that do a lot of hiring and for those who are screening far-flung candidates for executive positions.

For job seekers, I see a mixed blessing. Video screening ups the number of applicants who get part of the way in the door for consideration. As with Bradford’s assistant, it allows some who might otherwise have been cast aside to make it to the final roster. Also if you are looking for work while you already have a job, it’s very helpful to be able to record an interview on your own time, early in the morning or after work. For those used to webcams and Skype, video interviewing may be more comfortable than in-person meetings.

But I also see a big downside for candidates, especially for those who are unemployed. The job search process has become terribly impersonal and isolating, with communication done primarily by email. In-person interviews offer rare networking opportunities, where face-to-face contact can allow candidates to make a human bond that can lead to other things. A scripted video interview offers no space for small talk or discussion of current events, hobbies or a shared alma mater, the kinds of connections that can lead to unexpected opportunities. Perhaps a hiring manager has a friend at another company who is looking to hire, or who would be a good contact for the applicant. There is no chance he would impart such information with a recording. Also, some of us need to be sitting across from another person to really open up and shine.

HireVue is about to announce a new application, called OpenVue, that will allow hiring managers to send out one-way interview requests to groups of people over social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn. This seems like a timely innovation and one that makes the spread of one-way interviews all the more likely.

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I’m very surprised some of Hirevue’s competitors weren’t mentioned, like Active Interview, which on top of one-way video interviewing, also offers taking the interview by phone and a white label service where companies can host the entire video interviewing platform on their own domain. http://activeinterview.com

Great article. To reiterate, YouTube has 4 billion daily video views, which is a 25% increase in the past eight months. Video is a massive part of business now and even more so in the near future. Harnessing Video in a controlled interview process & platform will save the industry billions through better decision making earlier on in the process(es) leading to quicker and more efficient hires.

Patrick Co-Founder of infullview.com

Infullview offers a way for recruiters and businesses (not just the enterprise level) to use video interviewing as part of their hiring process. We have already proven to save up to 56% on costs using our unique technology.

I like the use of video, though I wonder why ALL candidates aren’t simply uploading videos to youtube anyway. Videos could practically replace the resume. And on top of all that, why are we not talking about the extensive research that shows hiring people using unstructured interviews is fundamentally ineffective. Your odds of getting a successful person in that position are about the same as choosing people randomly. I wish we would see companies leveraging video and the internet to really shake up the hiring process, rather than finding new ways to use the old process.

Video interviewing and video resumes are very different things – not even like comparing apples to oranges, more like apples to a car.

Video resumes will likely never take off for a few reasons but the real reason is all about the technology business uses to collect, search and analyze resumes when you apply. While it is widely accepted that you “apply online” for most jobs, few people realize then your resume is put into a database that gets searched like a google search to see if you are a match. Until the major vendors totally restructure their products (don’t hold your breath) and video’s become as searchable as a .doc or .pdf is for key content that is said, not just tagged – the video resume idea will remain exactly where it has been since it got a lot of buzz back in 2004-2006.

Thank you for publishing, what I would consider to be, one of the most thoughtful discussions about video interviewing there has been to business leaders outside of HR.

While as the other comment mentioned, I wish you would have made mention of the other 4-5 vendors competitive in this space (Active, AsyncInterview, Montage, Take the Interview, Wowzer, etc) – I think the discussion around what it is and why it adds value is spot on.

Where I would disagree with you is on your “downsides” to candidates – A recent survey my firm completed in partnership with another video interviewing provider found that candidates actually appreciated the video interview because it “gave them a chance to show who they were beyond a resume.”

The reality of hiring today is this: 100-500 = average number or resumes a recruiter gets depending on company size and job level 10-15 = number of candidates that will get a “phone interview” 3-4 = number of those candidates that will get a “in person interview”

From a ROI level for business leaders debating cost on any of the vendors – our research also shows that for every one of those phone screens, more than half of companies spend 15+ minutes just to schedule one, not counting the 30+ minute phone interview time. At a average of 10-15, you are looking at a time waste of 150-225 minutes on top of 300-450 minutes of interview time…per opening.

For companies that embrace video screening as a step before/in partnership with phone interviews, they can screen 2-3x more candidates in less time and give more unemployed candidates a chance to share their story and make a personal connection than they could have ever dreamed with the traditional hiring process.

One-way/Recorded video interviewing isn’t strategically designed to replace in person interviewing or those in person meetings – its designed to bring the human connection back into a process that is so personal and emotional for people and help organizations find the right talent more efficiently than ever before.

It has been amazing to watch the Digital Interviewing category grow. A while back I identified more than 20 vendors on my website Inside Talent Management Technology, and I think there are probably more than 30 now.

I don’t necessarily agree on the downside regarding lack of human contact. The reality is – the inefficiency of the recruiting process is already limiting that possibility anyway – as most job seekers experience the “black hole” and don’t even get a call. Plus, the goal of this is not to eliminate the in-person interview, it is to make sure those interviews are of higher quality. When bad interviews happen it can be a waste of the candidate’s time too.

The challenge I see for job seekers is that they need to learn a new skill – which is how to talk into a web cam and come across well.

HireVue has definitely been a trailblazer in the space, and it will be interesting to see some of the new developments, like OpenVue, they will be launching.

Great article! As the leading HCM technology consulting firm, HRchitect has been involved in helping organizations around recruiting processes and technologies for more than 15 years. HireVue has been on our radar for years and has done some tremendously innovative things in raising awareness of video interviewing and how it is changing the hiring process, for both employers and prospective employees, especially given the virtual world we all live in! Congratulations to the HireVue team on this great exposure!

Excellent piece, being an HR Pro that has actually used digital interviewing – both live digital interviewing and video for digital screening of applicants – I can say HireVue is the best video interviewing product I’ve used. Their UI is light years ahead of the competitor products, and their ease of use from the candidate side is second to none. Too many of those in the industry forget to talk about how easy is this to use for candidates – it’s always about how easy is it for hiring managers and HR/Talent Pros to use. In the end I need this to be seamless for the talent I’m trying to reach – and HireVue has done this perfectly.

As an HR Pro I can also attest to the power of video interviewing and screening. I was working on trying to fill an executive role at an organization I worked who reported directly to the CEO. I sent the CEO 5 great resumes of candidates and he abruptly turned them all down. I had 3 of the candidates do 3 video screening questions and sent the CEO links to all 3 videos – and he wanted to personally interview all 3. It’s very powerful!

Excellent article! I’m a big fan of HireVue. There are others in the space, but their product is the best I’ve come across and their support is unrivaled. I understand the potential downsides expressed, but I don’t think they are such large concerns and any potential issues for job seekers are far outweighed by the advantages. Video already has traction in the hiring process and the potential for improvements is vast.